MOVIE ON STORM: Gossip, lies and info broadcast on wildfire at Easy A

Sometimes helping others won't help yourself in return.

We must admit it: high school is more likely to be the most scandalous stage we can even get through in life. Rewriting our once-clean reputations, I observed, would abruptly evolve into proudly having a bunch of girlfriends/boyfriends, fans clubs and a flock of BFFs only to be well-known for its constant fall down of members because of sickening squabbles.

Others may say high school is their death sentence: zero social network, struggles in studies, occasional black eyes, unwanted visitors after classes and total isolation might be their nightmares.

They say sometimes in life, helping others is the surest way to help yourself. But for Olive Penderghast the Easy A, it was a complete irony.

THE LIE: I JUST LOST MY V-CARD

Olive is an anonymous high school student unfortunately tortured by the big fat lie she made up of losing her virginity (yep, that's the V-card) to a completely nonexistent college freshman, eventually leading her to be famous for being a "super slut".

The lies pile up after she told it to her best friend Rhiannon, then heard by a Jesus-freak schoolmate and the gossip suddenly spread like wildfire. And we must all agree her peer pressure towards her so-called BFF started it all.

To some extent, peers and "close friends" aren't really true comrades. I've seen girl and boy orgs in my class crumble into 2-5 members all because of secrets, pride, jealousy and senseless misunderstandings. I've also been taught to not take real social networking seriously, because these faces I see today will all be gone in the end, and won't really help me mold my future. It's all because the truth is, true friends should not really be at our side forever.

Olive and her BFF Rhiannon: "I worry about how information circulates in our school."

THE GOSSIP: FASTER THAN THE SPEED OF LIGHT

I must say gossip is right next to love in making the world go round. Say your secret in the lavatory and the rest of the school disgustingly stares at you the moment you open the door. As Olive had described it, her "terminological inexactitude" traveled at an "accelerated velocity", the common knowledge about gossip we already shouldn't be surprised about.

And it's actually true; we even believe in and harvest gossips more rather than find out and analyze if our national hero was really gay or not.

I remembered my Filipino teacher said, "Ang naniniwala sa sabi-sabi ay walang bait sa sarili." Believing in gossip, we were taught, is a crime against ourselves, because we would actually believe in lies we even don't want to evaluate or question.

THE INFO BROADCAST: EVOLUTION OF COMMUNICATION

What's worse about gossip, is it has an element of "dagdag-bawas". And this is the truth about communication: Ms. Gossip Girl rumors about her BFF having a new boyfriend, eavesdropping ears pile up, and the last person in line receives the wrong tweet that the BFF is already pregnant.

The warped information dissemination has evolved long before the Tabon Man era. Primitive people drew figures and symbols on walls and poked messages in bottles to communicate with each other, but then nobody really knew if they understood each other.

For Olive's already-indecent status, her identifier of losing her V-card outrageously evolved into spanking a classmate because of a nasty comment, and being a "dirty skank".

Olive's redemption: "Log on to www.FreeOlive.com to confirm if I'm really a super slut or not"

Of course, in the end, she was able to get out of her hellhole and haunted her downtrodden "clients" online, who measly paid her automotive GC's just so to tell the whole school she did "things" with them. Until then, learning from this movie, LET'S NOT SAY WE DID SOMETHING WE REALLY DIDN'T.